Aporia

James Baldwin, from “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” quoted by my friend Jack July, whom I miss.

I love this letter and I love Baldwin, but I wonder if he isn’t wrong about humanity: whatever its capacity for “destruction and death,” it is less than that of the rest of the living world and indeed of the universe, if one can consider cosmic events destructive. Which is to say: to whom does he compare us? A sublime ideal, one which exists solely by virtue of the tremendous imaginative capacities of the human mind, without which the very concepts of peace and justice, which he feels we violate, would not exist.

The best reason to be philosophical about death and destruction is not because we must resign ourselves to that idiot species known as man, with his imbecilic violence and chaos; no, for though we are violent we alone renounce violence; though we kill we alone regret killing; we alone care for the needy and lame, if imperfectly. I am an animal-lover, but I feel no sense of moral inferiority: animals are beneath morality, while we strive, if imperfectly, to embody it.

No, we should be philosophical about death and destruction because though we stand in opposition to them both persist, almost as though they are integral to the structure of the world: as though life cannot exist without death and creation relies on destruction. We must understand them and come to peace with them as though they are like gravity, heat, entropy.

His position might be restated: “We’re not angels, and I therefore feel we are worse than beasts, although we’ve invented angels and overtaken beasts in all measures of compassion, decency, love.” This is a common enough refrain: we are wretched, scarcely tolerable, and the world would be better off without us. I wonder what the proponents of this view see when they peer out into the emptiness of space, or at the bloody maw of some victorious predator, or the swarming ants devouring a nest of baby birds. We are the only moral agents in the cosmos, yet their moral outrage over our imperfection inclines them to wish us extinct: to leave a universe in which there is no restraint, no quarter for the weak, nothing but instinctual murder and the amoral order of ecosystems.